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FreudianSlippers posted:Only if it's old because it spoils a lot faster and tends to spoil worse. There's a reason pasteurization was invented. There are, in fact, lots of nasty diseases that can be transmitted through raw milk. It's only been in the last century that sanitation has improved enough that raw milk can be considered even close to safe. The reason people drank it for centuries was because it was still better than almost anything else they had to drink and without the germ theory of disease they didn't know that their milk was a problem.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:16
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goose fleet posted:How would they make the correlation in their heads without any understanding of biology? Cow udders don't look like the equivalent human parts at all. Yeah, ancient people were really bad at anthropomorphizing and drawing parallels to shared mammalian features. No furry gods for them! They also would never do a thing like, I dunno, worship goddesses with outsize mammaries in recognition of the importance that nursing played in, you know, life. Takes real modern biological knowledge to figure that one out.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:19
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So cavemen were the first furries. That's amazing. Next question: who thought eggs were a good idea to eat? This was way before hen farms, so you probably have some guy in a loincloth and a spear hanging out in the woods. He comes across a nest, there's an egg in it. Breaks the egg, there's hopefully not a developing baby bird inside. Raw yolks are incredibly disgusting unless you have the acquired taste, and you'd need some source of fire to cook them. Someone had to like the taste enough to bring it back to camp and try cooking it.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:24
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goose fleet posted:Next question: who thought eggs were a good idea to eat? Snakes and birds and um
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Jul 8, 2015 02:27
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goose fleet posted:So cavemen were the first furries. That's amazing. Man, who first looked at a berry and was like, 'man, what is this? I bet I should put it in my mouth.' I mean, they're all red and gross, they look like zits. No but seriously, eggs are a pretty common staple for a whole plethora of species. We're talking reptiles here. Cow milk is a way bigger leap.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:29
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It's disgusting but it's still food. Where I come from people eat fermented shark and sheep testicles that have been boiled and cured in lactic acid. It's all very disgusting but back in the day people ate it to keep themselves from starving and curing and fermenting it made sure it lasted longer so you could build up stores. People today eat it because it's traditional or something. People will eat basically anything to not starve.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:30
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Sure, but unless you're swallowing that egg whole like a snake can, you're gonna end up with a huge mouthful of gritty eggshell fragments. At least berries are soft and are meant to look attractive to eat because it's a means of seed dispersal.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:31
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What I want to know is how they managed to cultivate and cure all those foods that are either 1. horribly poisonous in their undomesticated form (like almonds), or 2. poisonous or inedible without being bruised and cured in brine over several months (like olives). Some of the most ancient cultivated foods are just... brutally complicated to process and eat. I can only imagine that their exploitation stemmed from systemic, sustained desperation, and I wonder how many other utterly inedible plants were put through the process as well in the hopes of turning over something edible.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:31
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goose fleet posted:Sure, but unless you're swallowing that egg whole like a snake can, you're gonna end up with a huge mouthful of gritty eggshell fragments. At least berries are soft and are meant to look attractive to eat because it's a means of seed dispersal. I've seen snakes breaking the eggs before eating them and birds sure as hell do that. I'm not really sure where you're going with this
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Jul 8, 2015 02:42
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FreudianSlippers posted:People will eat basically anything to not starve. No kidding. Back in WW2, my great-grand-parents were digging up frozen leftovers of slaughtered animals to make soup out of them, because there was a grand total of 0 food otherwise unless you wanted to ask the Nazis for some. goose fleet posted:Sure, but unless you're swallowing that egg whole like a snake can, you're gonna end up with a huge mouthful of gritty eggshell fragments. At least berries are soft and are meant to look attractive to eat because it's a means of seed dispersal. People were more than capable of seeing an animal eat something, and figuring out that it maaaay be edible.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:42
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:What I want to know is how they managed to cultivate and cure all those foods that are either 1. horribly poisonous in their undomesticated form (like almonds), or 2. poisonous or inedible without being bruised and cured in brine over several months (like olives). I'm going to take a stab that the olives-cured-in-brine bit probably had something to do with olives that had fallen in the ocean and were subsequently gathered, but that's really only a guess on my part.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:10
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the JJ posted:Cow milk is a way bigger leap. Milk is loving huge, humans need lactose persistence mutation to even consume it in large amounts. Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Some of the most ancient cultivated foods are just... brutally complicated to process and eat. I can only imagine that their exploitation stemmed from systemic, sustained desperation, and I wonder how many other utterly inedible plants were put through the process as well in the hopes of turning over something edible. I'm guessing taste is the main factor here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVvQnsKuOcE Try something like acorns. As a young boy I often chewed on acorns, but they were pretty bitter. If I took the tops and the outer shell off though they were OK. Acorn flour was a big part of the indigenous North American diet for many peoples. Boil them a couple times to leach out the tannins, and you've got something that most people would be O.K. eating daily. I wish we knew more about human digestion. What if we could just look at something and know how much energy we'd get from digesting it, and if there was anything harmful in it. I'm sure the future people who will read this archive will be chuckling at such quaint notions of "cooking" and "needing to make an effort to feed yourself". I mean, plastics are just supercomplex hydrocarbons. What if we had gut bacteria that could digest, say PE? You could eat the plastic bottle your sodapop comes in.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:14
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PT6A posted:I'm going to take a stab that the olives-cured-in-brine bit probably had something to do with olives that had fallen in the ocean and were subsequently gathered, but that's really only a guess on my part. Yeah, I suspect most of them are serendipity of some sort - either an accident, a random discovery, or attempting to preserve one type of food in a way that worked for another.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:14
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How many times did a lot of these things have to be rediscovered before writing came around?
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Jul 8, 2015 03:18
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goose fleet posted:How many times did a lot of these things have to be rediscovered before writing came around?  An unknowable but finite amount of times. Stuff still has to be rediscovered even after writing comes about. For example the opium smoking detailed earlier, even stuff thats closer to the modern day, to say nothing of concrete, the steam engine or Greek Fire. Is there even a single person alive today who knows how to make dried blood plasma? It was produced industrially just 70 years ago, and not only is it impossible to purchase today, it is very difficult to even piece together the full details of the process. I ran into these troubles a while back when trying to find a lighter weight blood replacement for alpine search and rescue teams, and expeditions. It seems like everyone has just given up and is using saline.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:26
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goose fleet posted:Sure, but unless you're swallowing that egg whole like a snake can, you're gonna end up with a huge mouthful of gritty eggshell fragments. At least berries are soft and are meant to look attractive to eat because it's a means of seed dispersal. there were no vaccines back then so the ancients weren't retarded
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Jul 8, 2015 03:26
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:What I want to know is how they managed to cultivate and cure all those foods that are either 1. horribly poisonous in their undomesticated form (like almonds), or 2. poisonous or inedible without being bruised and cured in brine over several months (like olives). I'm sure people have mucking around with poo poo since before people existed, but I'm not sure if I would put it down to desperation. After all, if you've got 14 hours of leisure time and no internet, figuring out how to make poo poo edible is a good way to spend your time if you're bored. Remember, ancient people weren't stupid, they had the exact same intellectual capabilities as we do. They just didn't have all the millenia of cultural heritage we can rely on, but that didn't make them in any more stupid than we are.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:28
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goose fleet posted:How many times did a lot of these things have to be rediscovered before writing came around? It's too bad there was no way to remember anything or pass on knowledge from one generation to the next before writing was invented.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:28
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goose fleet posted:How many times did a lot of these things have to be rediscovered before writing came around? poo poo like cooking and crafts, those sorts of techniques, still pass on very well without literacy. Hell, I cook most of my parent's recipes from memory.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:29
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Phobophilia posted:Having a big pit filled with grains and lots of guys with spears to guard it also helps with food security. It's not like hunter-gathering is naturally food-secure. If your foraging ground runs out and the next one along the line collapsed for some reason, you're pretty hosed unless you have enough food to get to the next-next foraging area along the line. The biggest issue for hunter/gatherer populations is seasonal food bottlenecks. If your population is capped by what can be foraged in the dead of winter, you'll spend most of your life with way more food available than you can eat.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:50
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Cities ruined everything by taking us from a state of nature where there was only natural inequality, moderated by our natural human instinct toward pity, to one where there is also civil inequality and the resulting war, murder, heartlessness, and cruelty. Then writing ruined everything again by taking human beings from creatures with nigh-infallible memories to ones who just look things up in books all the time.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:51
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FreudianSlippers posted:Only if it's old because it spoils a lot faster and tends to spoil worse. Because it was a bucket full of rot after a day. Same reason it actually took until the 19th century for grape juice as opposed to wine to be something you could easily get if you hadn't just squished up some grapes.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:54
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Keldoclock posted:
Just as a note, I believe the reason we never took up the steam engine as a technology was due to the limitations of metallurgy at the time. There was no way of knowing the pressure tolerance of the container, without even the fact that there wasn't really a reliable way of knowing the pressure itself. Without being able to reliably manufacture materials with different tolerances it was impossible to create emergency vents so too much pressure meant the thing went boom. With the small toys and curiosities the Greeks used it for that was fine but an engine big enough to actually do work? Serious injuries and deaths would have resulted. On Greek fire, the most recent theory I've heard is that this was likely some sort of unprocessed oil that needed to be melted to the point where it was viscous. You needed quite a lot of open heat source to do this, whilst using bellows and vents to keep the temperature constant all while you're on a boat that isn't the most stable platform in the world. One big wave unexpectedly could tip over your coals, upset your bellows or, god forbid, cause some of the oil to leak onto the coals and set the whole cauldron ablaze. Combined with a relatively short range of 30ft or so, it was a technology that was only really useful when used in calm seas, defensively. I guess I'm saying there's a reason that technologies sometimes die out only to be rediscovered but it's usually due to the fact that there are other limitations that make it not useful rather than everyone who can do it dying out or people just not being able to make that fundamental connection that would have transformed society. Invention and innovation do rely strongly on people making new connections and putting things together but that equally requires a huge groundwork of knowledge and technology to be able to make those connections. It's entirely possible there were Greeks dreaming of combining a steam engine with a rail track but it just wasn't workable at the time.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:26
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Nintendo Kid posted:Because it was a bucket full of rot after a day. Well, the easiest way to store these kinds of foods is to fill them with bacteriostatic chemicals. Ethanol is a good option for this, as are acids, or high concentrations of ions such as salt or nitrites. So that's why we ferment sugar water using yeast to produce ethanol, or ferment milk with lactobacillus to produce yoghurt or cheese.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:34
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Tao Jones posted:Cities ruined everything by taking us from a state of nature where there was only natural inequality, moderated by our natural human instinct toward pity, to one where there is also civil inequality and the resulting war, murder, heartlessness, and cruelty. Yeah, infant mortality is a lot of fun.
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Jul 8, 2015 05:19
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Friendly Tumour posted:i don't think it takes a huge amount of deduction to figure out how udders work if you're surrounded by goats every single day of your bloody life Speaking of goats and ideas, ever heard how they make goat cheese? In order to end up with actual cheese, you need rennet, which is an enzyme that's found in the stomach of young ruminants. Without it, the process doesn't work. How did somebody come up with this?
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Jul 8, 2015 06:43
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JaucheCharly posted:Speaking of goats and ideas, ever heard how they make goat cheese? In order to end up with actual cheese, you need rennet, which is an enzyme that's found in the stomach of young ruminants. Without it, the process doesn't work. How did somebody come up with this? People used animal stomachs, bladders as water bottles back then so its not weird at all. Of course, modern rennet is synthetic. I've made fruit punch and left it in a thermos in the fridge for a few days and ended up with some very light wine(to my great surprise) when I eventually took it out hiking. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 06:52
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Also on the milk front have you ever seen an animal nursing or having a phantom pregnancy? Those nipples leak and those young animals are not the cleanest eaters. I include humans here too. If you're really hungry it doesnt take much to put 2&2 together and try it. Especially if for whatevere reason you don't want to slaughter the aninal. Now its just a case of finding someone who is less lactose intolerant than average somewhere in europe who tries it and oh hello we have the beginnings of a new food sorce.
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Jul 8, 2015 07:03
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Really, they're eating just about every other part of the animal, some more weird goo isn't going to be out of the way.
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Jul 8, 2015 07:32
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I'm pretty sure animal milk was weird mystery goo to the ancients. How would they know what milk even is?
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Jul 8, 2015 14:08
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The idea that there's a tiny list of animals (and even beyond that, only certain parts of them) we can eat is probably the result of modern agriculture more than anything else. My family has a cookbook from 1910 and there's all kinds of meals in there that call for game like squirrel and rabbit. Most 21st century Americans would think those are weird things to eat, but it's not that big a stretch to imagine some ancient dude who hasn't had nutrients in a while trying to eat whatever, other people seeing that he didn't die from eating it, and then giving it a shot themselves. The first guy to eat a crab must have been completely loving nuts, though.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:28
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Tao Jones posted:The idea that there's a tiny list of animals (and even beyond that, only certain parts of them) we can eat is probably the result of modern agriculture more than anything else. My family has a cookbook from 1910 and there's all kinds of meals in there that call for game like squirrel and rabbit. Most 21st century Americans would think those are weird things to eat, but it's not that big a stretch to imagine some ancient dude who hasn't had nutrients in a while trying to eat whatever, other people seeing that he didn't die from eating it, and then giving it a shot themselves. dogs are the best livestock though since they herd themselves
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Jul 8, 2015 14:29
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Tao Jones posted:The idea that there's a tiny list of animals (and even beyond that, only certain parts of them) we can eat is probably the result of modern agriculture more than anything else. My family has a cookbook from 1910 and there's all kinds of meals in there that call for game like squirrel and rabbit. Most 21st century Americans would think those are weird things to eat, but it's not that big a stretch to imagine some ancient dude who hasn't had nutrients in a while trying to eat whatever, other people seeing that he didn't die from eating it, and then giving it a shot themselves. People think rabbits are a weird thing to eat?
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Jul 8, 2015 14:39
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Some cultures eat insects. What most omnivorous animals do is small exploratory bites of new food sources. If they get ill, then they get nauseous, throw up the food before it can do more harm, and stop associating it with food. If they don't get ill, then they keep eating it. And because humans are a social animal, fellow members of the group also start consuming that as a food source, and the process spreads memetically. Arglebargle III posted:I'm pretty sure animal milk was weird mystery goo to the ancients. How would they know what milk even is? I'm pretty sure that half the human species secretes this weird mystery goo at certain periods in their life. In fact, almost all human species ate this weird mystery goo very early in their life!
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Jul 8, 2015 14:45
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Ras Het posted:People think rabbits are a weird thing to eat? In most parts of the US yeah, rabbits are pet animals not food animals. I don't think anybody's shocked at the idea but they're rarely eaten.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:51
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Eating food is disgusting and we shouldn't be doing it anymore. Bonus: No more poop!
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Jul 8, 2015 14:52
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm pretty sure animal milk was weird mystery goo to the ancients. How would they know what milk even is? Somebody must have added 1+1 and realized it's similar to the stuff that comes out of the breasts of human females when they had babies? I mean titties are great? Grand Fromage posted:In most parts of the US yeah, rabbits are pet animals not food animals. I don't think anybody's shocked at the idea but they're rarely eaten. Wife's grandma killed a rabbit when we came over (she kept some in a hutch). Had the pelt hung up over the doorframe. The eye she gave to the cat.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:05
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JaucheCharly posted:I mean titties are great? You really don't want to know what ancient humans looked like on a daily basis.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:09
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Ras Het posted:People think rabbits are a weird thing to eat? Yeah. Not to the same degree as horsemeat or something like that, but you don't see it often at all. It's delicious and more people should eat it.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:10
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm pretty sure animal milk was weird mystery goo to the ancients. How would they know what milk even is? because half of them made it probably the half that tended the farm animals, when i think about it
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Jul 8, 2015 15:12
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